Posted on 03/19/2002 7:00:57 AM PST by travelagent
Hope this works, first time poster. You are all probably aware that US carriers are going to zero commission for travel agents. I ask you to consider the following:
This is nothing more than and increase to the traveling public as travel agents have no choice but to charge $35-$50 to passengers for issuing airline tickets.
Could it be that the airlines want to kill a business that has successfully served the traveling public for many years and supports the communities in which they work and live? Or could it be that the airlines want to take out the only advocate the public has.
Why would someone pay that to a travel agent?
First because we truly do know where the best savings are and will always offer options. Travel agents provide a valuable service to millions of American citizens who travel, both in offering advice and counsel during the purchasing phase of travel planning, but also in servicing travelers whose trips have been interrupted due to weather, airline flight interruption, family emergencies, and especially in the event of a national emergency similar to that which occurred September 11, 2001. No inanimate airline website nor even the thousands of airline reservations agents, many of whom have since been laid off, could service the tens of thousands of stranded travelers who were suddenly impacted by the events of September 11, 2001.
By the way if you were traveling during the Sept. 11th time frame and you called the airline you were booked on you would have heard a recording suggesting you call a travel agent, they can't handle servicing the public!
Without a travel agent to keep the airlines honest passengers will only pay higher prices in the end. Don't kid yourselves, that is the game plan.
The DOJ needs to get some real pressure applied to them regarding the practices of US airlines. The system is broke and no amount of taxpayer money is gonna save them.
I could go on and on but am curious if any Freeper's see the picture here and are willing to step up to the plate and demand that this back end increase to passengers be stopped and demand that our tax dollars stop feeding tha airlines.
If you, as you say, are providing a valuable service, you should have no qualms about charging fees to your customers. If they agree with your assessment, they'll pay.
I'm afraid your warnings about travel agents "keeping the airlines honest" is a particularly silly notion. Try to be honest yourself: Agents with deals with certain airlines have been known to withhold lower fare information on other airlines. I won't fault the industry for that, but I certainly am not going to cry in my beer for the middle man, which is what the travel agent is.
"The DOJ needs to get some real pressure applied to them regarding the practices of US airlines. The system is broke and no amount of taxpayer money is gonna save them."
I'm gonna have to disagree -- respectfully of course. If travel agents provide a valuble service, then people will pay for it. But travel agents are not an arm of the U.S. government, and the U.S. government has no business requiring airlines to subsidize them with commissions or in any other fashion.
What you seem to be advocating is government control of a patently private sector of the economy to benefit passengers. It looks good on paper, as it must have done in Italy and Germany in the 1930's. It didn't work then, and I, for one, wouldn't like to see it tried again.
They don't want to pay a middle-man for what they think they can do themselves.
Although your point of providing a service to people stranded -- as they were on 9/11 -- is valid, many FReepers appear to believe they can handle those problems on their own. In my limited 'business' travel experience -- I rarely accumulated more than 30 or 40 thousand miles per year over 7 years -- I was still able to take care of myself without the assistance of a travel agent.
Of course, this is all just MHO!
Everything is "Bill of Rights This" or "Such and Such Bill of Rights". Taxpayers, patients, telephone customers, poultry consumers, and now, travel agents. Meanwhile, the real Bill of Rights, the first ten amendments to the US Constitution, are being ignored by every level of the Federal Judiciary and Legislature. Read the Bill of Rights, and then read the "Patients Bill of Rights". The former fits on a page and spells out in succinct (if somewhat dated) language that basic freedoms of our system of government. The latter goes on for ten thousand pages, is fully understood by noone, and is mostly dedicated to taking those freedoms away. To have the name of one applied to the other is an obscenity.
Sorry travelagent, but this particular thing just frosts my mug. Call your protectionist scheme just about anything else and I will give you a hearing. Try to pass it off as anything remotely resembling the sacred Bill of Rights, and you will just earn my disdain.
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